2026-06-26 15:16:19Damon stepped into Room 256 and let the door shut behind him.
Lila crossed to the king-size bed and half reclined on the edge of it, arranging herself for him to look at.
The thin straps of her top gave up another centimeter.
"I was starting to think you'd changed your mind. I'm Lila."
"Damon."
He picked up the desk chair, carried it across the room, and set it down two meters from the bed before he sat in it.
"Let's get on with it."
Lila looked him over and decided she approved anyway.
"A man who doesn't waste time. Better looking than I was hoping for, as well. Tall, strong, healthy."
She patted the sheets beside her and crossed her legs so the skirt rode up.
"Come and sit here, handsome. We'll talk about how this works."
"Why don't you call your husband in."
The purring stopped.
"Why would we need my husband?"
"Because I can fix whatever's wrong with him. Then the two of you can have your child the normal way, and neither of us has to be in this room."
Lila blinked at him, and then she laughed and shook her head.
"You're funny. Stop messing around."
"I'm perfectly serious."
Damon leaned back in the chair like a man with an afternoon to spare.
"I do some healing work. If your husband could father a child you wouldn't be putting ads in the paper for strangers. Bring him in, I'll treat him, and my rates are fair."
Lila kept smiling while Damon read the rest of the room.
The door sat a fraction off its latch. In the carpet outside it were fresh scuff marks, worn in by a heavy man who stood there often.
A second phone lay face down on the nightstand, and its screen was still warm.
Whatever this room was for, it had been used for it a great many times.
He had never planned to earn that money by doing what the advertisement asked. Cure the husband, charge him properly, and let everyone go home better off than they started.
Eight years in the worst prison on earth, and Damon Huntley still did business like a country doctor.
Then Lila's face went flat, and the seduction shut off.
"Well. Looks like an idiot walked into my trap the honest way."
She turned her head toward the door and shouted.
"Come in, boys!"
The door banged open and four men came through it fast, spreading around the bed like they had done it before.
"You put your hands on the boss's wife, you piece of garbage."
"On the floor. Hands behind your head."
The biggest of them came in last, thick-necked and already red in the face.
"You tried to sleep with my wife!"
Daryl jabbed a finger across the room at him.
"You get on that phone and you call your people. A hundred grand in this room inside the hour.
"Or they carry you out of this hotel in pieces, and nobody in Dorne City asks me a single question about it."
Damon looked at the four of them, then at Lila, who was already dabbing at dry eyes.
Harlan had explained this hustle across a chessboard one winter in Tartarus. The woman baits, the husband bursts in, the wallet opens.
It worked on lonely men and on husbands. It had never once caught somebody with nothing left to lose.
Damon stayed in the chair.
"Hands behind my head."
He almost smiled.
"No. That sounds like work."
The four of them exchanged a look. Their script was being ignored and they didn't care for it.
Then they charged.
Damon's hand came off the armrest and caught the nearest two by the skull.
He drove their heads together. The crack was wet and it came back off all four walls.
Both men went down without putting their hands out, and neither of them moved again.
The other pair came in low with their arms wide.
Damon kicked the plastic bin beside his chair.
It came off the floor like it had been fired out of a naval gun and put them both through the far wall.
Plaster came down in sheets. The window frame jumped in its housing, and on the floor below a light fitting fell out of the ceiling.
They lay in the hole with their ribs broken in a dozen places.
The bin rolled back across the carpet and stopped in the middle of the room.
Undamaged.
Lila didn't dare get off the bed.
"Darling!"
Lila crawled across the floor to Daryl and got him sitting up. He spat blood onto the carpet.
Daryl had gone white under the blood on his mouth.
"You're dead," Daryl said. "Dead meat."
One of his men had dragged himself upright against the wall.
"Boss. Boss, listen to me. This one isn't a civilian, he fights for real.
"Call the Iceman. He's downstairs in the lobby lounge tonight, right this minute."
Daryl froze.
Two years ago he had watched the Iceman break a man's hands at a dinner table for interrupting him. Then the Iceman finished his soup.
But Daryl's ribs made the decision for him. He got his phone out and dialed with shaking, bloody fingers.
"Mr. Iceman! It's Daryl. We're in trouble up here and I'm begging you. Come up to Room 256."
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014 You Think You're the Mayor?
The laughter hit the private terrace like a wave breaking.Vanessa's aunt laughed so hard she had to put her wine down. The cousin who had spent the whole lunch on his phone looked up, delighted with something better than his screen.Even the servers by the door traded looks.The ex-convict had said it out loud. At a table full of people who knew exactly what the Presidential Suite was."Did you hear that? The rented husband takes lunch with the head of the Administration Department!"One of the uncles wheezed it out and had to put a hand on the table."Careful. Maybe he's the mayor himself, traveling in disguise. We should all bow."Vanessa stared at the tablecloth and prayed for the floor to open up.Two days. She had known him for two days.He had already burned through more of her family's respect than she had built in twenty-six years.I should never have brought him here.Shane came out of his laughter with the ease of a man who did this professionally. He leaned back, swirled hi
013 Cheating Husband
Damon walked the length of the great hall and pulled the front door open.Vanessa Quinn stood on the steps with her arms folded, looking at the courtyard and the fountain. Her eyes came back to the doorway and found him standing in it."Damon? What are you doing here?""I live here."Her eyebrows climbed. She looked past him into a foyer the size of her family's ballroom.Then she arrived at exactly the conclusion Lucy Croft had reached upstairs twenty minutes earlier."Oh."Her whole posture went soft, and almost kind."Well, good for you. Getting taken on as a watchman at a place like this, straight out of prison? That's better than most people manage."Damon said nothing."Forbes Construction handles the maintenance here, so I'm up on a routine inspection. I didn't know they'd started hiring for nights."She paused."You could have told me. It would have made this morning easier to explain.""I find silence explains most things."Vanessa stared at him for half a second, trying to de
012 High Net Worth
"Put that down before you hurt yourself."He said it like a man telling her to mind the step. No alarm, no defending himself, and no apology at all, which was the only thing that stopped Lucy screaming again."You're threatening the man who pulled you out of a wreck this morning, with a letter opener. Sit down and breathe."Damon swung his legs off the bed and walked past the blade as if it were a chair.He took an apple out of the bowl and bit into it. The crack of it filled the quiet room.Lucy held the dagger up for several long seconds with her breathing ragged.Then she lowered it. There's a limit to how long anybody can point a knife at a man eating fruit."Saved me from what.""Somebody put a bomb inside your chest. A very specialized one, and it went off early. I took it out and dealt with it, and you'll be tired for a day.""A bomb. Inside my chest.""Rampage energy, folded up and set to a schedule. It started going off early and the shock hit your heart before it reached your
011 Soul Binding
Damon pressed two fingers to her wrist and began.His free hand moved in fast, precise strikes. A walking line of points down both arms, across the chest, up the throat.Her body arched once off the bed with a gasp, then went completely limp. She was barely breathing.Everything in her slowed down except the thing in her chest, which pulled tighter once a second and kept getting faster.Damon raised his right hand and drew.Sovereign force came up out of his core and into the arm. The hand changed.The flesh went pale, then bright, then clear. A hand made of gold light, with the bones inside it showing darker.The Spectral Fist. Arcane surgery, and it didn't cut because it had no need to.He drove his hand into her chest.The skin didn't stop him and neither did the bone. His hand went into her without cutting anything, and closed around the thing coiled up in the middle.It was like gripping the inside of a frozen furnace.Damon set his shoulders and pulled.It came out with a wet tea
010 Rampage
Damon used perhaps a twentieth of what he had.The punch met the Porsche's nose at the exact instant the bumper reached him.The sound was a single enormous boom, thunder made at ground level. It rolled out across the ridge and put birds up out of the trees for half a kilometer.A shockwave went down the road. Every window in the gatehouse a hundred meters uphill hummed in its frame.And the car stopped.Not slowed. Not skidded. Stopped, as if the mountain had reached out and taken hold of it.The hood crumpled inward around his fist like foil closing over a stone.The engine block folded, and the frame buckled in a long ripple back through the doors.The rear wheels came off the ground. The whole chassis stood vertical for a full second, then slammed back down.The front end had buried itself thirty centimeters into the asphalt.Damon lowered his smoking fist and rolled the shoulder once. He had not moved his feet.The driver's door came off its hinges with one pull.A young woman lay
009 The Rented Husband
The birthday lunch came back to life with indecent speed.Inside ten minutes the great room had rearranged itself into a celebration. Champagne poured, chairs pulled in around Shane Dutton, and the coffin already being polished into a story worth retelling.Death had come to the house and left again. The Quinn family did what families do with a survived catastrophe and started turning the terror into an anecdote."He walked in and the Iceman simply fled.""That's the Dutton name. That's forty years of standing in this city.""And that ex-con nearly got us all killed. Cheap, he says. To the Iceman's face.""Do you understand what he almost did to this family?""He's a rented husband, and not a very good one. Vanessa, dear, didn't his own family want him either?""Two days. She's had him two days and he's already cost us the house."The laughter went around the table like a plate being passed.Vanessa stood at the edge of it with a glass she hadn't touched.She had walked into this house
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